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This can be such a stupid town sometimes. Over the weekend, a restaurant down the street by the name of the Parkmoor closed its doors after several decades of meeting the area's dusk-till-dawn grease consumption needs. The owner, daughter of the joint's founder, said she wasn't making enough money on the place, and so it was time to shut the doors for good. The place was another spice in our rack of Local Flavor, one of those capital-L Landmarks that strikes a chord with a lot of people in an age where there are fewer and fewer places to go where everybody knows your name. So all week, the paper's been full of slice-o'-life stories with people wistfully looking back at what a great place the Parkmoor is.
"I remember all the dates I had at the Parkmoor in the fifties." Ooh, wait. Hang on. That last one wasn't in any of the newspaper stories. But anyway, yeah. Everybody just loves the Parkmoor. Everybody loves it so much, in fact, that the city of Richmond Heights was actually presented with a petition with 150 signatures demanding that the Parkmoor not be shut down. This would have worked, except
1) the Parkmoor was a privately owned business; And that really gets to the heart of what's so dumb about this town sometimes. Everybody getting interviewed is so sad that the Parkmoor's closing, so wistful about all their memories of the place. But the reason they all had to look back wistfully is that none of them have bothered to go to the Parkmoor in the last 15 years. What's more, there were a lot of good reasons not to go to the Parkmoor. Well, if it was late enough and you were slap-happy enough, the decor was a real treat for the eyes. Stylistically, It was basically what would have happened if the Brady Bunch went into the restaurant business with a 1970s pornographer. Something about the burnt orange and green color scheme made me expect to see Quentin Tarantino filming in the adjoining booth. The thing is though, none of the people I know (meaning people who have actually eaten at the place this decade) have anything nice to say about it. When I talked to my peers about the closing, it wasn't, "Oh, Lordy, the carhops." It was, "Remember the time you ate those eggs there, and the bacteria inverted your bowels and colonized your esophagus and started that war with Portugal?" It was, "Remember the time you ordered that burger and it was so greasy and foul that it actually threw up on you?" It was, "Remember that time they brought out our food on that little wagon train of roaches?" It was, "Remember that time we asked for ketchup, and the waitress spat in your hair?" It's the Arena all over again. The St. Louis Arena was home of the Blues hockey team for 137 years. No one ever cared about it, and it fell apart. They closed it down. Five years passed. Someone announced that it would be torn down. Then, and only then, people began to loudly protest this surprise decision, as if it had seemed perfectly plausible to everyone in town that they were going to close it down, wait five years, and then just open it back up again once they were sure all the really dangerous parts of the ceiling had already safely caved in. Suddenly, after decades of leaving smeared nacho cheese on the seats, peanuts and phlegm on the floor, and filthy cups everywhere but the trashcans, everybody loved the Old Barn. People who chose their ballgame parking location based on how many homeless people they'd have to step over were threatening to chain themselves to the demolition equipment. Where these people were during the previous five years, before the Arena became the Stray Animal Burial Ground (as illustrated in a delightfully graphic TV news report the week before they blew the place up) and there was a chance in hell it could actually be restored, I have no idea. All I know is, they weren't at the Parkmoor. But that's us. The local color is the landmark you drive past on your way to the chain store. And then we insist that they leave it standing, so we can keep driving by it. "You can't destroy that part of our history! How will I be able to give people directions if I can't say, 'Turn left at the Parkmoor'?" Once they announced the closing, the place was packed. I'm easily as bad as anyone else. Worse. I went back there to eat for old times' sake, and I never even had any old times. The only memory I have of the Parkmoor is going there after seeing the movie Hook with my Russian foreign exchange student in high school and watching him insist to the waitress that, since it was legal for Russians to drink at any age, she needed to serve him a beer right now, as if producing his passport was going to activate a giant bubble of Russian law around him in America. The thing is, though, I never even got in to eat. I tried going for dinner half a dozen times in the last two weeks, and every time there was a sign on the door. "Closed - Out of Food Early." "Closed Due to Staff Shortage." "Closed Due to Dirty Spoons." "Closed Out of Boredom." "Closed to See the Look on Your Face." "Closed Due to Laughable Inability to Exploit Curiosity Seekers and General Self-Destructiveness." In death, as in life, the Parkmoor just wasn't particularly interested in service. Local flavor or not, sometimes the little guy doesn't get unfairly stomped. Some places close for a reason.
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Last week at work, we hired a new salesman. His first day was on Monday. My boss began to train him in the ways of our world. On Tuesday, we had pizza to celebrate his arrival at the company. While we ate the pizza, he said he needed to run to the post office. He never came back. Called once he was out of the building to say goodbye. That was that. 11 hours in our employ. Yet, as weird as that is, it wouldn't be that big a deal normally. Salespeople are like goldfish in that regard. You get two or three new ones at a time because one is always flush fodder. It was just the method I found a little bizarre, especially given the painstaking efforts they made to find a good new candidate. They make 'em do three interviews, phone interviews, meetings with half the people in the office….There are popes who practically breezed into office compared to this guy, all so he can pull off the kind of escapes I usually joke about. "Sure… I can have that project done… I just need to go get something out of my car…." I'm told it's not the first time in company history that's happened. I don't know what to make of that. So, I've been to three funerals in the last two weeks, one of my friends has cancer, and another one of my friends currently has a mom in the hospital with a heart attack. My mom's been to five funerals in that same period of time, and only one of hers was one of mine. It makes me think about how lucky I am, in a way, but it also makes me think about the apocalypse. It seems like everyone is meeting a bad end. Dogma is coming out this weekend, after all.
*** MOM: Who died? I didn't see anyone in the funeral notices this week. ME: Why do you read the funeral notices every day? I'll never understand that. MOM: Who died? ME: So-and-so died. MOM: What? When? ME: Yesterday. MOM: It wasn't in the paper! ME: Well, I dunno what to tell ya, Mom. He passed away yesterday. MOM: I didn't read anything about that in the paper! I didn't read that anywhere! ME: I…! what do you…? Gotcha! Gotcha, Mom! He's here with me now! Want me to put him on the line?
I let myself get too exasperated, I know, but I swear…. Talking to my mother, you would think a person's soul went to the newspaper when they died.
I said, "Jesus Christ!" the other day, and somebody shushed me. Somebody my own age. Turned to me and hissed, "All right now!" and made a face at me like my dad. It was even weirder than the guy quitting mid-pizza. The more I think about this, the more it pisses me in a kind of spirit-versus-letter-of-the-law sort of way. I may be foul-mouthed, but I can't remember the last time I felt right enough about anything to shush another adult.
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How is it that I manage to disagree with people over things that I think are completely mundane? I enter into what I think are just typical conversations, and I end up conducting a poll to verify my own sanity. I was having dinner with a friend over the weekend, and the topic of dating came up as it often does. He sort of asked if I had my eye on anyone, in a way that told me he had his eye on someone for me to have my eye on. "No, not really," I said. "I'm not doing it that way next time." "What do you mean?" he asked. "Well, the way I see it, she (whoever she is) needs to come after me this time. I'm not going to be the pursuer this go-round." I thought he was gonna choke on his food. "What do you mean? The woman doesn't pursue! That's not the way it works! Women don't pursue, and the ones that do… well, you don't want 'em!" "How do you figure?! No no. I want 'em. The last couple of times, I've expressed interest in the object of my affection, and she basically looked me up and down and said, 'Ehhhhhhhh… Sure. I'm not really doing anything else at the moment. Let's see where this goes. You have a week. Then Space Jam will be out on video, and I'll be able to entertain myself.' Screw that. Last time, my self esteem got deflated with a circular saw. Next time I enter into a relationship, I want the starting point to involve her being so crazy about me that she has to—gasp!—come up and tell me so. The higher her opinion is in the beginning, the longer it'll take for me to ruin it." "But how would she know to ask you out? How does she even know your feelings? There's a definite intimidation factor there with the rejection." "Well, yeah! No s***! Welcome to the last decade of my life!" "If you wait for a woman to ask you out, you will be waiting forever." "First of all, thanks for the vote of confidence. Second of all, I'm about as comfortable in my skin as I've been in years.* I've got disposable income and a nice place and friends…frankly, there are about two things I miss about dating, neither of which I can say aloud in a family restaurant." Then there was some talk of this woman who may be interested in me. The talk was so cloak and dagger, I don't even know what the hell we were talking about. And at some point, he asked, "Would you be at all interested?" and I got the distinct impression that someone liked me, and ergo I was expected to ask her out. I responded by saying something like, "BLEAAAAARGH!!!" Then it just devolved into this thing where he said, "Well fine then. I hope you like the single life," and I said, "I like it fine," and he said, "Good then," and I said, "Fine," and he said, "Good," and so on. Ever since then, I've been running to people like mad and saying, "Women ask men out! Don't they? Don't they??" and keeping a running tally. It's a toss-up, with the only thing approaching a consensus being that I'd better get used to living alone. Mission accomplished. *As evidence of my newfound sense of "this is me, deal or f*** off," I had this conversation while wearing a hockey jersey with the emblem of the Klingon empire emblazoned on it. I always maintained to my ex-girlfriend that this jersey was the ultimate inside joke. It was, after all, an athletic uniform celebrating Star Trek. More importantly, the people who would think you were an idiot for wearing a Klingon hockey jersey were the same people who would have no idea what a Klingon hockey jersey was, rendering the wearer some kind of cloaked nerd. My ex- was horrified, and although she ended up buying me the shirt, it was more out of defeat than anything else. Her vocal disapproval cowed me enough that I only wore it to bed for years. But recently, I've taken to saying, "Hell yeah! This is who I am! Love me, love my Klingon hockey jersey!" Because really, if you're around people who think you're a dork, don't you want to locate and weed out those muthaph***as as quickly as possible? Better to just be the freak you are and make it the world's problem rather than living like you're a problem… right? Is that growth or just selfishness?
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When I was a senior in high school, I was the chauffeur in a carpool with one car. I drove a 1989 Dodge Colt, a little red jelly bean-lookin' thing most noted for the half-dozen occasions on which friends of mine lifted it up and moved it both without my knowledge and/or at my request. (Ever parallel park so closely that you just can't get out on your own?) Into this slight little roller skate three or four younger fellows from my neighborhood would cram daily, paying me a king's ransom in gas money they got from their moms at the end of every week. Usually, it was a very jovial ride home, especially since one of the regular passengers, a vain primping used Kleenex of a boy named Knuckles, had gotten his own set of wheels. Or maybe he was the manager of the wrestling team or a football tackling dummy or something. I forget. The important thing was, he wasn't in my car anymore. Unfortunately, this created a vacancy in the back seat which was occasionally filled by Andrew. Andrew, although he did not ride with us often, was easily fifteen times more irritating than Knuckles. He made Knuckles look like a shrinking violet. Chris Farley was Woody Allen compared to Andrew. Even now, when I type his name, I am rewarded by a stabbing pain in my temples. I had known Andrew in grade school, when I was in 4th grade and he was in my sister's 1st grade class, and I hadn't despised him then. As far as I can tell, his chief problem was that he was a freshman in a car full of juniors driven by a senior. He wanted to fit in with the established group. Unlike a lot of older guys, we didn't pummel him initially, and I guess our friendly warmth excited him. Hell, a stiff breeze excited him. He was like a Chihuahua raised entirely on Pixie Sticks and Dexatrim. And he smelled like cooking oil. At any rate, Andrew's chief method of joking around with the guys entailed calling them names, jostling them, lamely attempting to take jibes at anything they expressed an opinion on, yelling directly into their ears at top volume as a "joke," and most venally, reaching into the front seat to change my radio stations. There are former acquaintances of mine who walk this earth without hands just for trying that from the front seat, and none of them ever knocked my car into neutral on the highway. The thing Andrew found hilarious, more than anything on earth?: Our anger at him. Oh, it was tremendous encouragement. Frankly, it was a long enough car ride without him. One day, after a long and joyous respite, Andrew joined Brian, Matt and I with a bizarre passenger. He threw his bookbag in my trunk/hatch/shoebox, and piled into the backseat with a bag of flour. The flour was, of course, wearing a diaper. It had a face. It was smiling at me in the rearview mirror. Its skull said, "STAN." There was a long pause. "Hey there, Andrew," I said with as much patience as I was likely to muster, "what's with Stan, the smiling incontinent bag of flour?" or something equally pithy. "This is Matt Bell's flour baby." The pause was less long this time. "I see." Andrew felt this explanation sufficient. He started scanning the dial for some Paula Abdul. After significant swatting, Andrew explained that one of the freshman theology teachers had decided to teach the 14 year olds to keep an eye on their sperm by teaching them what a pain in the arse it is to have to take care of a baby. Instead of the traditional fragile baby surrogate, an egg, the teacher had settled on a personalized bag of flour. (A superior choice, if you ask me; like babies, flour can survive the occasional accidental dropping, plus no morbid baby-frying parties at the end of the project.) Stan the flour bag's father was a football player, and ergo he needed a babysitter during practice (since being caught stuffing your baby in a locker resulted in some extremely severe penalty that the teacher had threatened but, as I recall, couldn't have possibly carried out, possibly involving a firing squad.) The father, having the mental capacity of a football player, decided that Andrew would be an excellent nanny. The ride home was typically unbearable. Andrew was a hurricane of annoyance, jabbering and yapping and bouncing around like a nitwit. At one point, his jostling became too much and Brian shoved him. He thought this was hilarious, and so Andrew elbowed him. It was a minor tussle, but I could see in the mirror that Brian and Matt were going red in the face as I looked back to shout, "Stop touching him! Stay on your side of the car!" like some soccer mom, when suddenly they all got very still. "Oh, s***," said Matt without the luxury of asterisks. My blood ran cold. "Jim?" said Andrew meekly. "Jim? Stan… Stan is bleeding." I made a noise like a chicken laying an egg and feebly reached behind my head in a vain effort to grab Andrew's hair and scalp him with my bare hands. Matt and Brian had become a flour baby EMT unit, applying pressure to the wound and trying to hold the growing tear together as spilling flour turned my car into a giant hourglass. "Hold it… dammit, hold still!" "You're making it worse! You're making it worse!!!" "Do you have any tape?!" "Yeah, I always have tape in my car!! It's in the glove box, underneath the glitter glue and safety scissors, you little nutsack!" "Well, I don't know!" "ACK! What the **** are you doing to my backseat?! It looks like a drug deal gone bad! I hope you know your way home from here, because so help me God--!" Andrew made a desperate effort to quell the flour, and with a mighty POOF! my car looked like a steam room, full of puffy white clouds and hacking coughs. My passengers looked like the Ghostbusters after their climactic battle with the marshmallow man. If Brian had not taken action at that exact moment, it would have been Andrew, not Stan, who needed to be contained in a bag. At that moment, however, the juniors had an epiphany. Matt and Brian looked at one another like the human pastries they now were, simultaneously said "oh, to hell with this!" and grabbed Stan by the face while I rolled down the window. Several more ounces of Stan ended up in our laps during the ensuing struggle, as Andrew, meek for the first time in a year, pitifully cried out, "He's a football player! He's a football player!!!" Stan dangled out the window like an action hero for a minute, spewing a white trail that made it look like the poor man's James Bond smoke screen. A fellow motorist honked in appreciation from behind us. And then it was over. Stan hit the shoulder of the highway like a dunked basketball and burst in one last apocalyptic POOF, leaving us to somberly ponder what we had just done as we caught our breath between the hysterical gales of laughter. Except for Andrew, who sat in horrified silence trying desperately to preserve a mental picture of Stan until he could get to the grocery store for a bag of flour. I'm told that neither the father nor the theology teacher ever noticed. (Even if the teacher had noticed, the football player earnestly believed that he was doing a good job, since Andrew wisely never told him what happened. Plausible deniability!) Every day for the rest of the year, we would slow down on the way home and look over at Stan. One day, a road crew cleaned him off the highway. We learned a lot about ourselves that year. Why am I thinking about this story? Just now, my friend Joe called as I watched TV. My spirits leapt; my other plans having mysteriously vanished, I was eager to do something. "What are you doing right now?" he asked. "Nothing!" I said. "Nothing at all! What's the plan?" "We're on our way to a play. Could you tell my girlfriend the flour baby story?" So I did. They thanked me. They hung up. That was all they'd wanted. They called me up to tell the story, and that was pretty much it. I never did end up going anywhere. I think I should start charging.
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My people irritate me. I just had one of my favorite things, namely an entire weekend when I had nothing to do and no one expecting me anywhere. Sure, I lament the fact that nobody's around anymore, but the truth is I often feel caged by social commitments. If you've ever had a job with shifts, you know the feeling I mean: you'll have to go to work at, say, 4:00, and you get up at 10:00, and you have hours and hours and hours to do whatever you want, but instead you sit there all day until it's time to go to work like a prisoner on death row, because you know that work is just sitting there menacingly on your future like an angry fat man, just sitting there swallowing up the whole day. I get that way about dinner plans. "Unnnh… my time is not my own… I promised it to other people, and now I'm not free to do anything else, like sit at home and groan about having nothing to do. Groan." I have a friend who'll sandpaper this nerve every once in a while, because he likes to have control over his life. He likes to know What's Going On. There are times when he'll call me at 10:30 on a Monday morning to make plans for the weekend. Recently, he tried to cement plans for a Saturday while we were out on the previous Saturday. I nearly had an old-fashioned, Reefer Madness-style freak-out. "What are you doing? No! No plans for going out! We're out now!" "If we don't plan something now, nothing will end up getting agreed on at all and Friday night we'll have no idea what's going on." "Right! Right! Sounds good!" (Funniest thing about this "planning": on the night in question, a group of five people agreed to show up at my apartment simultaneously at a precisely designated time in several different but precisely designated vehicles, each with passengers that had been assigned well in advance. It was known exactly who was driving, who would be riding with whom, and how the seating assignments would change as soon as the addition of my car became a factor. Until the moment we left my apartment, however, not a single solitary neuron had been fired over where the f*** we were actually going. "So, what sounds good to you?" "I don't know, where haven't you eaten in a while?" "Hmmm… I dunno. What sounds good?" Interesting postscript: I became so worn down by the way things proceeded after getting the evening off on this foot that, when it was time to finish dinner and go to the club to listen to f***ing Vargas f***ing Swing, which by the way is apparently the only band that has been allowed to play in the St. Louis city limits this year, I opted to bail on the evening early and watch Star Trek. This in turn caused one of the ladies, who supposedly had some mild infatuation with me, to conclude that I was obviously leaving because I hated the sight her. After all, it is a well known fact that I base all of my actions around my opinions of a woman I hardly know. Sarcasm aside, people now keep asking me why I hate her and what's wrong with her. This is the sitcom that is my life. This is not, however, what this journal entry was actually supposed to be about.) I have a problem with crowds, and I have a different idea of fun than a lot of people I know. By necessity, then, I have become very comfortable with doing things by myself. If I sat around waiting for people to do my fun stuff with, the only person who'd ever end up taking me out would be the coroner's office. If it's a contest between an antique mall, a toy store, and another friggin' bar ("this one is a quiet, out of the way place, honest"), well, it's no contest at all. I swear ta Gawd, I'm never gonna get to go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show again; you'd think cross-dressing was contagious. So, I scour the papers for comic book and sci-fi conventions, I keep a constant eye on the movie showtimes, and I spend substantial quality time with me. And I miss having someone to share it all with—sometimes I still feel like I'm missing a half—but typically I enjoy my life. It was in that spirit that I treated myself to a walk to the movie theater on a bizarrely warm and beautiful November morning. I am utterly in love with this neighborhood. No domestic disturbances. Nobody smoking weed in the stairwell. I haven't had to call the cops once since I moved here. The most unusual thing I ever see is that house a block down the street. The people who live there apparently subscribe to fifteen newspapers but don't read any of them; it looks like they're trying to build a fort out of them in their front yard some days. The unusually warm air and a brisk stroll put me in an excellent mood, as did finally having the chance to see Sleepy Hollow without the usual opening-night mob scene in the ticket line. I've gotten spoiled by living so close; I'm so used to leaving my house five minutes before showtime and being seated in plenty of time that any time there actually is a line, I'm at a loss for words. So you can imagine my reaction when I turned the corner at the front of the theater only to be greeted by 100 chanting people. They weren't actually in line to see a movie; they were in line to scare people away from one, namely Dogma. I had been surprised when I'd been able to get in unmolested on opening night, but apparently the protesters were awaiting a more comfortable day to be outraged. A piece of blue tape had been placed on the concrete to separate their half of the world from my half. Someone was saying a rosary into a megaphone by the ticket window; many of the others were holding signs that read, "STOP BLASPHEMING OUR LORD NOW!" Just as I was yearning for a videocamera and some witty interview questions, a man dressed as a monk caught my eye and gave his sign two little shakes in my direction. So I went to see Dogma again instead. The thing is, these are supposed to be my people. I'm supposed to want to be out here, or at least honk and give them a thumbs-up. Instead, I am incredibly, incredibly irritated. I feel closer ties to the people who made the movie. I mean, God forbid somebody asks questions about the faith and comes up with answers without memorizing the catechism. Heaven help us if someone in the family doesn't tow the line in front of the non-Catholics while he's trying to figure some things out. We're doomed! God isn't strong enough to handle that kind of PR! "STOP BLASPHEMING OUR LORD NOW!" Give me a break. Being afraid of what a movie could do to the Church is the most profound lack of faith I've seen in a good long time. I don't know who you're praying to, but my God can take care of Himself just fine. I had a friend tell me what an awful movie it was (sight unseen, of course) and I quite unexpectedly found myself about ready to go ballistic over it. It absolutely pushes my mad button when people act like I'm offering them drugs when I suggest it's a good movie. I hate the unspoken implication that I'm some unwitting purveyor of temptation, skulking in from the murky shadows, saying "Come on… it's not that bad… tryyyy it" and pulling open my dirty overcoat full of heroin, kiddie porn, and movies that actually use the word "Christ" in a non-curse word capacity. I liked a movie; that doesn't make me the pied piper of Satan. I'd like to think that, if I were the antichrist, I'd know it.
Also, as I grow older, I am amazed at how many things are exactly like alcohol. I'm not going to go into this too much more. The movie spoke to me in places, but I'm not concerned with preaching about Dogma. What's on my mind is that one of the most important things about a religion is that sense of community and belonging, and it seems like every time I try to feel my way back in, my people keep trying to show me I'm not one of them. I feel extremely alienated right now. The people in front of that theater just looked like robots to me. And not cool Star Wars space robots. More like those one-armed, car door painting robots at the Chrysler plant. I mean, even my mom kinda liked the movie. Although she did warn me that it was "probably sacrilicorice."
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I paid a visit to my parents the other night, something I do every once in a while but not nearly as frequently as they would like. In fact, even I'm starting to feel like I visit too infrequently; an inordinate number of people around me have lost parents in recent weeks, or nearly lost them, and I find myself thinking that me and the folks may not necessarily have a whole lot of time left together. They both have their ailments. None of us is going to stop aging any time soon. As a matter of fact, my dad is taking one of the biggest steps an old man can take: he is thinking about his retirement. Really thinking about it, I mean. One gets the sense that my dad has been thinking about his retirement since the day he started working, so intricate has his investment strategy been. My father could have commanded an army if he'd stepped away from the ledgers long enough. Instead, he has spent his whole life working towards a single goal: not working anymore. I shouldn't make fun. At least he's had a goal. At any rate, retirement has stopped being an abstraction in our household; it has become the kind of thing one can count down to on a calendar, X-ing out days until you get to the day with hand-drawn pictures of palm trees and an extended middle finger on it. I have known retirement is no longer an abstraction, not because anyone told me (although we did talk about it later), but because of my father's sudden, acute, and mind-blowingly transparent attempt to stop spending money entirely now that he's not gonna make any anymore. And I mean, this is my dad I'm talking about. He's never exactly run down the street dropping burlap bags with dollar signs drawn on them into people's laps. One of my most enduring memories of childhood are the daily occasions when I'd be watching TV, and I'd get up to go get a soda or something, and during the four seconds when I was in the kitchen my dad would enter the room and say, "Why are these lights and this TV on if nobody's in here? We pay money for this electricity, you know!" I mean, I remember when I got five dollars a week for cutting the grass and my dad would say, "When I was a kid, we did chores because we were told to, not because we were paid to," expecting me to convert to doing my despised amateur landscaping pro bono. So, it's always been a household with its eye on the ducats, if you know what I mean. Now, though, it's just gotten out of control. It's gone beyond the level I last noticed, when he was checking on my sister's grades just to make sure she was still on schedule to graduate so he could stop paying for her college education. When I went to spend time with my folks the other night, our conversation positively took a turn for the surreal. We were sitting in the kitchen, and out of nowhere he turned to me and said, "You know," he said to me, "I think Christmas in this family has really been overtaken by the gifts and the buying of the stuff. Over the years, we have just become so concerned with the things, and it shouldn't be about the things. It should be about the family, and the love, and just sitting down together on Christmas morning and sharing an inexpensive breakfast together." Now, while the words were not untrue, you'll have to pardon my suspicious nature when I say it's no coincidence that my dad expressed these sentiments for the first time ever the year he started thinking about retirement. Dad doesn't know how to not have income. "Dad," I said, trying not to poke too much fun, "I can see where you'd say that. Personally, I put a great deal of thought into the gifts I buy people, or at least I try to. I take great pains to make sure the 'buying of the stuff' is about the love. Seeing as you've never done the gift-buying, though, seeing as you traditionally give Mom the Visa and we get gifts that say 'From Mom and Dad' on the tags even though you don't know what's in any of the boxes, I can see where you would find the gifts impersonal. Nevertheless, I'm planning on a gift exchange this year. I hope no one minds. I hope I don't come off as, ya know, greedy for liking Christmas presents." "Still, we need to get together. We need to set aside a day…" "Oh, hear we go again with the setting aside of the day." "No, we do. We need to set aside a day of the week when you and I just go out to dinner or something." "Dad, I told you, that sounds like a great idea, and I certainly enjoy going out with you. I just don't want to set aside a day every week. I like a little bit of spontaneity. I really have a problem with having some kind of appointment sitting in the middle of my week." (See previous entry.) "It makes it more of an obligation and less of a good time. If you just call me up every once in a while and just invite me to… and see, I can't even say that, because then you'll just call me every single Tuesday. Tell ya what: we'll go out next week. You and me. Just let me know." "I'll come pick you up day before Thanksgiving. It can be a new tradition." Dad is a big lover of the tradition. "Absolutely. I accept. I look forward to it." "At any rate," he said, "we definitely need to go out more often. Grab a beer or whatever. Bring your sister along and whatnot. And you know, it would be nice if you guys could pick up the check every once in a while." ?!?! "Well, Dad, I mean, it shouldn't really be about the buying of the food. It should be about the family and the love." "Did your mom tell you I'm going to go back to doing some teaching next year?" "No, because Mom doesn't have that kind of sense of humor." "What do you mean? I'm really going to teach again." "Dad! When you were teaching before, you used to come home ready to strangle me just for being student-aged! 'What is wrong with kids?! All they care about is whether it's going to be on the test or not! They never do the reading. They think they can just come in with some hard luck story and get an A, like they're entitled to good grades because they paid money! They don't even show up unless they want an extension on an assignment!' Does any of this sound familiar? You hated teaching. The only reason you even did it was to pay the bills while you were temporarily out of wor- ohhhhhhhhhh, Iiiiiii see now. How's that retirement thing working out for ya, there?" The following week—this evening, actually—we got together and began our annual tradition of pre-Thanksgiving dinner. We chose a little pub not too far from my apartment, because if a week went by without me going to a bar the world would explode. It was good for the two of us. We talked about the family, and how much we were both kinda dreading Thanksgiving because the toddlers in our extended family are so hyper and loud. We talked about the stock market a LOT, not because I know anything about it but because he thinks I should. We talk sooooo very much about interest rates. We talk more about interest rates than any two people on earth, which is ironic considering my rate of interest in those talks is so very, very low. And that's how I know I love my dad. I will sit and talk for hours with him about the most hatefully dull and worldly thing I can imagine, just for the sake of making him happy. No matter how badly I want to say, "If I could think of a way to abolish money entirely and revert to a purely socialist state, I would do it with a hammer in my pocket, a sickle in my hand and a song in my heart," I never say it, because no matter how it might come across sometimes, I love my dad. And ya know, other than the interest rates, it was a pretty good evening up to a point. "It's getting late," he eventually said. "Yeah, we better get going," I laughed, "you need to baby-proof the house for tomorrow." "Yeah, no kidding. You owe me… let's see… let's say five bucks." "What? I do? What for?" "For dinner." You've got to be ****ing me. "You invited me where, and I owe you what?" "I figure the burger was about five, and I'll just cover the soda. No biggie." You've got to be ****ing ****ing me. "I…did not think I needed to have any cash on me tonight. For some strange reason." "Don't worry about it." "Thanks." "You can pay me back tomorrow. The ATM you used to use right by the house should be open." Holy ****, you have got to be ****ing ****ing me. "Yeah… yeah, okay. I'll, uh… have that… big five dollars for you tomorrow, for this… meal… you repeatedly asked me out to." ****.
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Although Thanksgiving is a state-invented holiday, one when being consumed with football and possessions is the whole point rather than being a perversion of the season, I still feel guilty when I catch myself being ungrateful at this time of year. Take away the Shopping Month starting gun and those godawful cranberry-based foods, and the idea of gathering with your loved ones and reflecting on how lucky you are is an unusually nice idea in principle. What I found this year, though, was that I was really jealous of people who weren't going home for the holiday. Hell, one of my friends had Thanksgiving alone rather than going home, and home was down the block. I could never do that—most of the family would be too busy to miss me, but my parents would be quietly disappointed in a way that would haunt dinner conversations for a long time—but for the last few years I've given it some serious thought. Actually, what I'd really like to do one of these days is have a Thanksgiving dinner for the adopted family that is my circle of friends. Like one of those sitcom Thanksgivings, when the entire cast of characters (all of whom have families of their own) must conveniently eat together in an audience-pleasing fashion for no logically consistent reason, where celebrating the holiday for a studio audience means Urkel must eat with the Winslows even though Urkel's family is presumably eating right next door without him. That would be nice. Get the whole cast together and have a Very Special Episode of my life. What I'll most likely do instead, though, is spend the next decade hating my cousins' kids. It wouldn't be a holiday without me whining about these kids. All I can do is sit and shake my head in bewilderment. I spend the holidays in shock and horror, like one of those special interest stories during a war or natural disaster where the show the guy standing in the rubble of what used to be his living room. In the span of three years, my family added six members under the age of five, and suddenly the fun was over, justlikethatbam. I always heard that you enjoyed the holidays less as you got older than you did as a kid. I presumed it was because you got responsibilities, because you got jaded by seeing that Charlie Brown special (sponsored in part by McDonald's! why not give your loved ones McDonald's gift certificates this holiday season? They'd love that! Did somebody say McDonald's?*) over and over again. Imagine my surprise when I learned that, as an adult, you enjoy the holidays less because of the kids.
It's especially terrifying because having kids is essentially the closest thing I have to a dream. I want to find myself a career-minded woman, settle down, and raise our children and keep our house from falling down while she does the work she went to school to do. When I see my cousins, though, it just makes me wanna cry, because there are obviously
Recipe for Hellspawn: And that's Thanksgiving. Kids beating each other to death and wrecking stuff, grown men and women pleading with children for mercy, and kids not taking anybody seriously because the worst they have to look forward to is some lame-@$$ "time out" that somebody's gonna spring 'em from early anyway. And I have to digest food during all of this, knowing full well that Christmas is just gonna be Thanksgiving with church clothes on.
I dragged myself out of bed and got to my parents' house ahead of schedule I arrived to a hero's welcome, with my sister as glad as ever to see me, if only because it gave her someone else to talk to. We are crutches for one another now that neither of us brings dates home. There is a wide gulf in age groups in our family; 50% are over 35, 49% are under 6, and then there's me and Sis. The last few years, we've just spent the day huddled together in the corner, guarding our food and possessions in shifts. "Good morning, dear," said my mom when she saw me. Her face gave me a sudden reminder. "Dammit!" I said. "What?" "Mom," I whispered, "I need to borrow five dollars." "Why?" "I owe Dad five bucks. I completely forgot about it until just now." "Why do you owe your father five dollars?" "For last night. For dinner." "You've got to be ****ing me." "That's what I said. I'll pay you back. I just don't wanna not have this money." After I paid my dad (with my mother muttering about it quietly), it wasn't long before the rest of the family started showing up with young'uns in tow. As always, they came with weapons. Balls, bats, and even a bizarre missile-like object with a tail like a bat handle that was supposed to be used as a football. Everybody had their weapons on hand so that the kids could play outside. I groaned out loud when I saw them. There are some movies wherein you are introduced to a character or plot element and immediately say, "That character is in this movie to be killed. He will be killed twenty minutes in. That fruit cart is going to be knocked over by Jackie Chan on a motorcycle. That guy the hero is confiding in is going to turn out to be the villain. That pie is on the table solely for the purpose of ending up in somebody's face, which it will in fifteen… fourteen… thirteen… twelve…." Thanksgiving is one such formulaic, slapstick, buddy-cop two-thumbs-down-and-broken experience. You take a look at my cousin with a baseball bat, and immediately the entire evening is written and filmed in your head, and you're never wrong. No one ever rises to the occasion and surprises you. There's never a plot twist. There's never a Shawshank Redemption. (It probably doesn't help that we always end up watching Fox's presentation of Home Alone II: Lost in New York. I'm sorry, but if there was ever a movie that did not deserve to be an annually broadcast holiday tradition, I think it's safe to say that one wears the crown. Why the hell is it on every year? "Oh, look, children! Joe Pesci's face has been smashed in by a paint bucket on a rope! Hahaha! It must be fractured in three or four hilarious places! Happy holidays! Oh hoho! Look out, Daniel Stern; Macauley's about to make you bleed internally! It sure is riotously funny when people hit one another!… Timmy! Timmy, put that hammer down and back away from her!" The remote control rarely finds it way into my hands, but it's not for lack of trying.) So they bring over these weapons so the kids can play outside with them. Then, though, see, they don't let the kids play outside. (Face begins to redden.) They bring over f@%#ing bats and projectiles, and the kids come in and start running laps around the furniture, and after about thirty seconds the three year old is fumbling with the doorknob to try and go outside. No one notices this until I say, "Hey! Hey! The children are escaping! Does anyone care?" And the parents (lost in the delightful reverie that comes on when they are finally in the presence of other adults again) snap their heads up like dogs that have just been awakened by the doorbell, look around, and decide letting the kids go outside is better than actually having to get up and see what they're doing. So the kids wander out into the yard one by one. After fifteen seconds, one of them comes inside for no discernible reason and then goes back outside. His little brother does the same thing almost immediately afterwards. This begins to annoy some parents, as does the fact that the children have made their way into the street despite my feeble discouragement. At this point, about ninety seconds into the outdoor excursion for which all the weapons have been brought, it becomes clear that either the children will have to come inside or an adult will have to go out and watch them. So, of course, the parents immediately have their children brought inside. For good measure, some of the parents treat the children like they've done something wrong for allowing themselves to be allowed outside for ninety seconds. Then they use the bats and balls inside. And they know, they know the minute they leave their houses, that they have no intention of going outside to play with these kids. So what the hell are they bringing over baseballs and bats for? Who do they think is gonna pitch? The four year old? This year, I emerged from my mom's computer room to something out of the cuckoo's nest. Two children were playing catch, with a game regulation baseball, three feet from my mother's china cabinet. As I went down to pick up my jaw, I couldn't help noticing that one of my cousins' kids was, in a quiet, methodical, and drum-like fashion, beating rhythmically on the living room wall with a baseball bat. Just hitting the wall over and over again, as if attempting some kind of tunneling escape into the kitchen. And this was in the living room, also known as the place where half a dozen grown-ups directly responsible for children were sitting comfortably. No one stops them. They're juggernauts. My father would protect his property, but by that point I think the paramedics had already wheeled him out with a stroke, a stroke brought on by my father's attempt to convert the power of his judgement into laser beams shot from his eyes at the children's parents in a silent and vain effort to coerce them into raising their children. I used to just go ahead and throttle the kids myself, but I'm told that isn't appreciated. I don't appreciate watching my mom clean up for two hours after the little s***s go home, but the lesson of the nineties has been that what I appreciate doesn't mean a thing to anyone. How many days till Christmas? *Horrifying commercial of the season: the sight of an animated Colonel Sanders donning a Santa hat, snowboarding around a giant chicken sandwich and doing the Cabbage Patch to his own freestyle rap. Swear to me, swear that when I die you'll all get together and prevent someone from using a cartoon of my violated corpse to sell fast food. I mean, that's the kind of promise I shouldn't have to ask for, but this is the world we live in. And I mean, just from a creative standpoint… the Cabbage Patch? He's Colonel Sanders!… Hello…! Ever heard of a dance called the Funky Chicken…? Should I just do the marketing for you…? ** I just want to go on record saying that I cannot believe Bill Gates is able to sell so much of this bass-ackwards software without being garroted. They want a computer in every home, in every appliance, doing every task with this Windows s***, and after a decade of its existence I STILL have to go over to someone's house on a monthly basis to explain what should be some basic f***ing function of it or fix some mistake that it should have been impossible to make in the first place. And don't gloat, iMac users; yours is almost as bad. The computer revolution is a joke, and we are its punchline. How else do you explain a software like Windows, in which you shut down by clicking the 'Start' button?
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